My posts on this site are now signed. You can find a gpg-block in the source
code of the page. Pass it to gpg, and you get the markdown used for
generating the site and check the signiture, if you have my GPG key installed.

WARNING: You will void your guarantee. I had to send in the laptop because the keyboard stopped working. Asus declined the guarantee request, because the harddrive was changed and the laptop was opened.

This tutorial describes how to open your Asus N750JV and replace the hard disks.
If you need to replace another part, at least the opening part should apply.

As the Asus N550JV is quite similar, judging from the specs, to the N750JV it might work for it
too, but I haven’t checked it. Please leave a comment, if you have one.

On the backside remove all 14(!) Torx screws. You then can remove the cover carefully.

The notebook contains two drive bays, one on the left and one on the right.
Depending on the type of your laptop one or both have already a drive inside.
You should already have made a backup of the drive you want to change; if not,
you should do it now. :p

If you only have one drive, the bay on the left is empty. We will use that as an
example below, the other one can be removed the same way.

Remove the four silver Philips screws holding the bay in place and pull it out
using the black strap.

If the bay already contains a drive, carefully remove the connector by pulling on it.

If the bay is empty, there is a rubber placeholder on one side. Remove it.

Place the new 2.5” drive in the bay, so that screw holes on the sides line up
with the holes in the drive. the connector should face to the side, where two
holes are present in the screw latch.

In the packaging of the laptop four screws are taped inside. Take them out and
screw them into the side of the bay, fixating the hard disk.

Connect the hard disk connector to the hard disk and but the bay back in. Align
the screw holes at the bottom of laptop and put the Phillips screws back in.

Make sure you haven’t left anything in the laptop that doesn’t belong there and
all cables line up correctly. Esp. the speaker cable can easily be pinched in.

Put the bottom lid of the laptop back and make sure everythink fits. Than put
the torx screws back in. (You might want to wait until you’ve checked that the
laptop recognizes the drive, so you don’t have to unscrew them again; or screw
in only a few first. Just be careful while rotating the laptop without screws holding the lid)

If everything was done correctly, your laptop should boot,
recognizing the new drive.

In python strings are immutable, that means you can’t change it after creation. When
you for example concatenate two strings a new one is created, so there is no way
to change the default parameter string.

But what happens if you use an empty list as the default parameter? I
expected to always get an empty list.

A list is mutable, that means you can add or change elements in the list. And
you get passed the same list instance each time on a call to append_one, as
variables are passed by reference in python. So this behaviour is actually not
that surprising. The same is the case for each other mutable class you pass as a
default argument.

But how can you use a mutable object?

There are several ways, but I like the following.

Instead of passing the object directly, we pass None and check for it in the function.